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A Common Vision: Our First 50 Years
Since 1976, KPF has been dedicated to impactful urban architecture, though its form and its focus has evolved over the decades.
Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) was founded in 1976 in New York City by partners A. Eugene “Gene” Kohn, William “Bill” Pedersen, and Sheldon “Shelly” Fox. Gene and Shelley, former classmates at the University of Pennsylvania, had worked together at the New York City office of Warnecke and Associates where Gene was President, and Bill, who had previously worked with I.M. Pei, had been hired as head designer. With the 1970s recession continuing to impact architecture firms around the country, the three men decided to leave Warnecke and form their own practice.
Gene became the new firm’s president and principal-in-charge of projects; Bill was the designer; and Shelley oversaw administration and finance. Today, that upstart firm has grown to a global practice of nearly 600 employees across multiple offices with projects recognized around the world for the quality of their designs and their impacts on cities. Through the firm’s evolution, the dynamic of that original partnership has continued to power KPF to the leading role it has played in contemporary architecture for over fifty years.
1976-1980: Formation and First Projects
Within a few short years of its first commission, transforming a former armory in Manhattan into a television studio for ABC, KPF had established itself as both an innovative design studio and a commercially successful practice that counted major American companies and developers among its client roster.
“Among those who have strongly influenced American architecture over the last decade...none provides a better sense of the temper of the times than does Kohn Pedersen Fox. Its work is the new American mainstream.”
Paul Goldberger, "Architecture that Pays off Handsomely" The New York Times, 16 March, 1986
1980s: Elevating the Building Blocks of American Cities
During the 1980s, KPF developed into a leading national architecture firm known for its creative and innovative postmodern design. KPF’s major office and headquarters projects of the 1980s, such as 333 West Wacker Drive in Chicago and the Procter & Gamble Headquarters in Cincinnati, were lauded for their memorable forms as well as their sensitive integration into surrounding urban fabric. 333 West Wacker would win an AIA National Award in 1984, the firm’s first. At around the same time, the firm began to explore the commercial and urban potential of vertical mixed-use with 900 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Featuring offices, residences, and a hotel stacked atop a retail podium, this project pioneered a new type of multifunctional high-rise building that would become a fixture of the firm’s work. In 1990, KPF won AIA’s Firm of the Year award, marking the firm’s arrival as an architectural powerhouse.
“The building that brought us to notice was 333 Wacker Drive. That was a wonderful opportunity. It was the point at which we started to gain our confidence.”
Bill Pedersen
1990s: KPF Goes Global
By the time the American commercial real estate boom of the 1980s went quiet in the early 1990s, KPF had already expanded abroad, opening a second office in London to serve a growing roster of European clients and building relationships with developers in Japan, China, South Korea, and Indonesia. These first projects abroad cemented the firm’s global perspective. Rather than exporting a preconceived architectural style, through projects such as the JR Central Towers & Station in Nagoya, Japan; Plaza 66 in Shanghai, China; and the Goldman Sachs London headquarters, KPF developed a design approach tailored to clients’ unique needs and the specificities of local context. KPF’s projects continued to garner acclaim for their daring forms and innovative solutions with the DZ Bank Headquarters, in Frankfurt, Germany, and the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C., each winning AIA National Architecture awards in 1994 and 1998, respectively.
“We’ve learned that more is better than less, that people like to be around other people, that diversity is a strength. Although big, mixed-use projects are difficult to assemble, plan, design, and build, their size allows them to provide amenities that aren’t economical in smaller ones.”
A. Eugene Kohn and Clifford Pearson. The World by Design the Story of a Global Architecture Firm, Rosetta Books, 2020
2000s: Mixed-Use and Supertall Towers
As the new millennium dawned, KPF continued to evolve, addressing a wider range of cities and typologies, adding transportation, healthcare, and higher education projects to its growing portfolio. At the same time, the firm honed its expertise in vertical urbanism, developing projects of extraordinary scale that have come to define the skylines of some of the most dynamic cities on earth. Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, completed in 2003, represented a new kind of large-scale urban development that would become a signature of the firm. Tall towers, too, were becoming a staple of the office. With the Shanghai World Financial Center, which completed in 2008 and followed up by the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong three years later, KPF acquired a reputation for designing some of the world’s most innovative, ambitious, and graceful supertall buildings. The continued expansion of KPF’s work in Asia during this period led to new offices in Seoul (2004), Shanghai (2005), and Hong Kong (2008) as well as a deepening of the firm’s commitment to a global perspective on architecture and urbanism. At the same time, the firm began to hone its expertise in the academic, cultural, and civic sectors, designing university buildings, courthouses, airports, and many other program-driven facilities.
2010s: Expanding Typologies
During a decade of rapid change, KPF adapted to an increasingly global and technologically driven world, applying deeply considered architectural solutions to ambitious projects across a wide range of cities and growing list of typologies. Academic buildings such as the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center in New York demonstrated the firm’s growing facility with complex, program-driven projects. A growing roster of residential projects, meanwhile, applied the firm’s contemporary design ethos to a resurgent interest in urban living.
As our projects grew in complexity, so too did the analytical and design tools at our disposal. KPF formed Design Technology (KPFdt) and Environmental Performance (KPFep) teams to apply data, technology, and computational design to better integrate our projects into environmental and urban systems and develop new architectural solutions to increasingly complex problems. Continued global expansion during the 2010s led to new outposts in San Francisco, Berlin, and Singapore while innovative projects including Centra Metro Park, One Jackson Square, and Floral Court won accolades from the AIA for their sensitive approach to urban architecture. In 2019, KPF joined many of its peers in signing the AIA 2030 Commitment to cut its projects’ environmental footprints and undertook an extensive audit of the firm’s own operational carbon emissions.
2020s: Redefining Global Cities
As cities around the world recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, a new model of mixed-use urbanism began to take hold in city centers that were shifting away from traditional central business districts and toward central social districts. KPF’s current era, defined by our mission to transform cities through contextually designed, carefully crafted, and high-performing architecture, is a response to these changes in how people live, work, and play in cities. A truly global practice with eight offices around the world, today KPF works across typologies, scales, and markets to design the future of the built environment and raise the bar for architecturally sophisticated and impactful projects.
"There are few stories in architecture like that of Kohn Pedersen Fox."
Paul Goldberger, Kohn Pedersen Fox Buildings and Projects 1976-1986 Rizzoli
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